Let Me In! This is My Home. Making Courageous and Dynamic Decisions.
"Forgive yourself for not knowing what you didn't know before you learned it." ~Maya Angelou
I’ve never been so pulled by Courage and shaken to my core by “what” Brave “is”, as I was while reading Viola Davis’ autobiography, Finding Me.
Her story is a contemporary odyssey of faith and resilience and discernment as she shares her struggles with poverty, racism, violence, and all the lies that appeared in many forms and disguises - spells that kept her lost in a sea of suffering and separation, like Maya seducing Siddhartha (from concentration) or the Sirens with Odysseus [from free will], or Arjuna and Krishna [from Dharma], or in the story of the Crucifixion and Resurrection [from the Truth of our Being].
Within them, all is a resolute VOW: to see clearly the undeniable moment of Truth and to trust the process of what is being worked out on the battlefield of our heart-mind, within justice and mercy, and in the minefields of the Soul - of trauma and healing.
In Being Myself, we are learning, as Rupert Spira shares, that “the being that shines as the essence of our self on the inside is the same being that shines as the essence of things on the outside.”
If Being myself is always the same, then on whose behalf am I seeking?
It made me think of the ancient custom of Xenia that kept coming up as Bill and I listened to the “Iliad and Odyssey” on our way down to Florida. Xenia is an agreement between host and guest - where the host graciously offers protection and comfort to a stranger without character put upon identity - name, race, gender, or hierarchy - and where the guest responds without demand, in gratitude - it’s a prayer of reciprocity and a blessing of hearth and home.
“Friend or foe?” predetermines one’s response and destiny.
In this way, “Finding Me” is a story about Viola coming home and asking and answering this question of herself. The response:
“Let me in. This is my home!”
It struck me hard… caught me by surprise!
Still, even with good intentions, without hope and faith, having a stranger show up at your door can trigger discomfort - feeling unsafe, unprepared and frozen.
Just imagine a desperate feeling knocking at your door - dread, denial, demanding, defending, determining — would you open it?
And, imagine the so many ways we shut ourselves out - hide, close the lights, and make believe no one is home and in “how,” when we label those unwanted guests, we stave away difficult and unwanted emotions that help us ground our gut - keep them from the warmth and comfort of enlightenment; and how, instead, we shame them - shun them, keep them in the dark, and in the course of doing so shame and shun ourselves right out of the light.
There is a sense of urgency to “attend” - to pay attention to who is at your door!
And, since we can only pay attention to one thought, one object, one guest at a time, it is vital that we attend to “what” it is that we are paying attention “to” - to “what” we are expecting or worshiping outside this moment and experience. This is, after all, our Original Sin - to believe that we are separate or different from the stranger at our door.
Not to worry!
The world has NOT gone to pot, though I implore you to put down that vape pen because every moment counts toward the internal discovery of the Self-Self Realization and the death of the ego.
This is the story of a Fool’s Journey disguised as a hero and it’s perfect, grist for the mill - it’s about courage, wisdom, and hope and how hope shows up when you vow to believe in yourself and how faith makes you brave. They’re inseparable, needing only the light of attention and non-judgment to be revealed. In this way, wisdom is in relationship with intuition, and hope is very conditional on these needs and this relationship - hope needs good company — Maslow, Skinner, and Pavlov walking into a bar aligned in love kind-of-potential.
To be so aligned and to serve on behalf of this Love and Absolute Truth, one must fundamentally and rightfully have a sense of Soul:
a sense of safety (to be grounded in the body - Pathos)
a sense of comfort (to have compassion for Self - Ethos)
and a sense of predictability (to be in loyal relationships - Logos).
To feel hopeless, then, is to have a soul lost from this TriUne - this One Tribe.
And I see this in our youth - how they feel lost following others - are seeking home, comfort, and a place to rest and not taught by their tribe, family, and country to be kind to the stranger in themselves, investing in fences of defense; and inhabiting these states and nations of difficult, harmful, hurtful thoughts that make it hard to have loving dreams.
And how they are also experimenting - blending colors and coloring outside the lines that once divided the generations before them. Like all that preceded them, they desire the freedom to be passionate and purposeful, and determined.
Still, a caution lies with every generation:
Be aware of the new boundaries that are being formed. When we lean too far into the idea of who we are, we are no better off than having to inhabit the ones that were given to us.
So what do we do? Surrender.
Like Viola, you pray. You get down on your knees - in whatever way that looks to you - and you get a present like you’ve never been and you ask for the restoration of strength - to receive all that you imagined was waiting, in detail! You say it out loud and you mean it!
And you vow that when “it” comes you’re not gonna’ make an excuse, sabotage yourself or run away.
You’re not gonna break your vow, the way Odysseus did when lied about his name and came uninvited into the cave of the Cyclops and ate all his food - both host and guest failed. Because we know that when you violate your own rule when you lie about your name when your words have no integrity - everything is affected and returned.
When Viola did just this - gave up fighting some idea she had about what everyone thought of her or “who” she “should” be - when she stopped running away from that gang of boys who were terrorizing her, and when she opened her heart and accepted the kindness of a stranger, her now husband Julius Tennon, (whose name means “devoted to God”), she was amplified and she was seen.
And, this devotion to the authentic is not to power or to empower another outside ourselves - a god or a teacher or a belief or such. Devotion is the penetrating attention upon that which we espouse - like Xenia when we are a friend to our thoughts when their comfort and safety come before they tell us their name and the courageous story it tells.
The name is Viola, interestingly enough, is associated with a gemstone that “invokes one’s strength to cope with life changes and transitions,” of which the greatest was within herself!
And, like the violin, the color is a symbol of humility and modesty - of knowing the tension and turn needed to receive this tone and sound of love - between bow and string and thought and sound, between oneself and the one that hears her song and then awakens to her own power.
Yeah!
Just like the crocus flowers announcing new things to come, Viola has erupted off the screen, and into our hearts showing us “how” faith reclaims our power to be fierce!
Who am I?
“Nobody -- that’s my name. Nobody -- so my mother and father call me, all my friends,” said Telemachus' when his mother asks the bard Phemius to stop singing about the Trojan War (as it caused her great grief to think about her husband).
The name “Odysseus” means “no man, no body.”
Ah! “I am. I am that.” (Exodus 3:14)